Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Chapter Outline
1.1 Introduction
1
1.2 Biosensor Markets and Economics
9
1.3 Chapter Contents
11
1.1 Introduction
Biosensor applications have expanded considerably over the last few years after a modest
beginning with the control application for the detection of glucose in the management of
diabetes mellitus (DM). This is due to the ease of application of these biosensors to different
areas of application. Some of the more recent areas of application include:
(a) Quantum dot biosensors for ultrasensitive multiplexed diagnostics (
Berger, 2010
).
(b) GE Healthcare have purchased Biacore
™
and Microtal
™
and combined the use of the
SPR (surface plasmon resonance) biosensor with ITC (isothermal titration calorimetry)
to provide orthogonal label-free determinations of affinity, binding kinetics, residence
time, and enthalpic efficiency. They have also developed Bia2iTC software that
compares outputs for both instruments (
GE Healthcare, personal communication, 2010
).
(c) Other interesting biosensor applications include (
SPIE, Optics/Photonics in Security and
Defence, 2006
):
(1) Unmanned/unattended sensors and sensor networks
(2) Technologies for optical countermeasures
(3) Optically based biological and chemical detection for defence
(4) Femtosecond phenomena and nonlinear optics
(5) Optics and photons for counter-terrorism and crime-fighting
(d) Different sensing platforms have been integrated to achieve results unattainable by
a single sensor. For example, electrochemical, mechanical, electrical, and optical
signal transduction have been integrated (
Center for Biosensors and Bioelectronics,
2010
).
(e) Recently,
Silicon Kinetics, Inc. (2010)
announced the development of new biosensor
chips with different surface chemistries. These surface chemistries could accommodate
